


outlier

by theformerone



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, I do what I want, Timeline What Timeline, Warring States Period (Naruto)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-07 00:00:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15896796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theformerone/pseuds/theformerone
Summary: "The Will of Fire is what sustains us," the Niidaime continues. "You are one branch of a great tree. You are one sibling in a large family. Act like it."Danzō doesn't want an apprentice. He gets one anyway.





	outlier

**Author's Note:**

> diiiiirectly inspired by [this tumblr post](https://purple-possibilities.tumblr.com/post/177734555184/narutoheretic-danzo-training-naruto-fic)

"You need an apprentice," Tobirama-sensei says, not bothering to look up. 

Danzō opens his mouth, then shuts it again. Hiruzen was the only one with a team, out of those on Team Tobirama. Kagami and Torifu didn't have students or apprentices. Homura was too busy with his work in the archives and Koharu was the best spy of their generation; she was out of the village too often. 

"Can I ask what for, sensei?" 

Tobirama hums, scribbles something down on one form before picking up the next.

"You're focusing too much inward," he says. "No man is an island. People are worried about you."

Danzō's mouth quirks down into a frown. Torifu, in all likelihood was the one that had told the Niidaime. Kagami was very aware that what Danzō whispered to him when they were alone and tangled in each other was meant to stay between them. Their relationship was already tenuous at best. Kagami wouldn't make such a broad step to damage that trust. 

"With all due respect - ,"

"You have great plans for the future," the Niidaime says, his red eyes still cast down at his paperwork. "But you forget what holds our village together."

Danzō grits his teeth. 

"The Will of Fire is what sustains us," he continues. "You are one branch of a great tree. You are one sibling in a large family. Act like it."

Danzō takes the dismissal for what it is. He shushins out of the Niidaime's office, jaw clicking with tension as his feet land on the street outside. 

An apprentice. As if he has time for an apprentice with war brewing. War is always brewing. Danzō needs to get out into the field the way Koharu is. He ought to be gathering information. Koharu is weeks deep in Kumo, actively doing things that are for the benefit of the village. Danzō's been jealous of her ever since she got her assignment. But she was a woman, with no defining facial characteristics; it was easier for her to get those assignments. Danzō was too distinctive, chin scar be damned.

Hiruzen was the teaching type. The nurturing type. So was Torifu for that matter. Kagami constantly had children flocking to him even in the clan compounds outside the Uchiha. Danzō was too mean, and that was by his own admission. He wasn't good with gently convincing people to do their best. He demanded it. That was how he had been taught, and he had flourished. 

But Danzō had been taught during the war by a family with no clan name. His parents had put him through hell and back to ensure that he would come home alive instead of in a matchbox at the end of the day. 

He doesn't know how to  _nurture_ how Hiruzen did, how Torifu could, how Kagami naturally seemed to be able to. Danzō was abrasive. Thought of as unkind to those who didn't know him. He was prickly. Not everyone's type. 

He's in his thirties. He's one of the lucky ones. He made it through the Second War with his entire team intact, with the Niidaime somehow surviving the Kinkaku Force. His parents are long dead. He lost his sister in the fighting with Kumo, and he placed his younger brother in the foster care system to avoid ruining his childhood more than it had already been altered. 

Besides, Danzō knew nothing about raising children. It was better to leave that to a professional. Besides, if Goro grew up without him, less would be the pain of the day when Danzō didn't come home from a mission. It was better this way.

An apprentice. It would be easier to have him foster a cat - to which he was allergic - than to make him responsible for the education of an entire fledgling shinobi. 

He doesn't know what the Niidaime is thinking. In all Danzō's years as a Konoha shinobi, he's never questioned Tobirama-sensei's methods. He had a great respect for the Shodaime, before and after he died. But his stalwart belief in the Will of Fire made Danzō falter, unsure. Family was easily broken. Everyone in Danzō's generation knew as much. Forcing tenuous bonds among other shinobi was a surefire way to garner heartbreak. 

His wanderings take him to the training grounds, his preferred place to think. He shoves his hands deep in his pockets and wonders if target practice will clear his mind. Will give him some insight onto why the Niidaime thinks he's the one who ought to be put in charge of some random child. Or _three_ in Hiruzen's case.

But there's already someone there. 

A child. A girl. A sobbing one. Which isn't especially uncommon. What is strange about her, is the fact that she's currently trying to kick the life out of a wooden training post. While weeping. 

Her form is decent, even through her tears, but Danzō can tell that she's been working at this for hours. She's going to overexert herself soon, though whether or not it's to exhaust her muscles so they get stronger or to exhaust herself emotionally, Danzō can't really tell. 

She's young. Academy age. She'd be one of Goro's contemporaries, if he hadn't been born too weak for shinobi work. She's dressed simply, which can only mean she's an orphan herself, and can't afford the finer clothes that clan shinobi can. 

And this child, weeping while she nearly snaps her own shin, dirty and alone makes something shift inside of them. 

Then there's a kunai flying for the space between his eyes. He catches it, blinking as the sniffling child collects herself. She looks lost but resolved, unsure about the stranger but unwilling to show him any vulnerability. 

He admires her paranoia. A hitai-ate wasn't a good enough reason not to engage with someone that snuck up on you. 

"Your teacher taught you well," he says, and volleys her knife back at her. 

She has to take a step forward to catch it, and she lands on the leg she had been abusing. She flinches hard, but her jaw is stuck in place. She wipes at her tear stained face but doesn't put her weapon away. 

"My teacher doesn't pay attention to me," she says, hiccuping on her own words. "My tutor won't teach me anything until my teacher says I'm advanced enough."

Her face is twisted in unhappiness, and another sob shudders it's way out of her. 

"I taught myself."

Danzō lifts a brow, surprised. It was true, the basics were there. Everything in her form spoke to her understanding of form and execution. Even her sharp instincts in terms of fight-first-ask-later were good, considering she was too small to have been old enough to fight during the more recent border skirmishes. 

It was difficult to teach paranoia. That was something learned in the orphan's quarter. Danzō didn't know about it personally, but Koharu and Homura were raised there. They didn't speak of it often, and usually only when inebriated. It wasn't a nice place to be. 

"What do you mean by advanced?"

The girl sniffs, wipes her nose on the sleeve of her red garment. 

"She says I need to be able to climb the Shodaime's face on the Hokage Monument with only a thimble full of chakra."

That had Tsunade written all over it. She was young, the Shodaime's firstborn and only child, but she had single handedly furthered her father's innovations in medical ninjutsu. If she was looking at training this child, that meant she was looking to train up medics as resilient and dangerous as herself. 

Danzō wasn't sure if he wanted to scowl or to smile. He appreciated her foresightedness; Tsunade was preparing for war as well. 

"Can you climb it at all?" he asks. 

The girl goes pink in the face, though not with embarrassment but with rage.

"I'm the only person in my three man cell who can climb trees with chakra," she snaps. "I'm the first one to learn water walking. _Yes_ , I can climb the monument with chakra. And without it. Sasuke-kun wouldn't look at me for a week afterward because I figured it out faster than he did."

The girl's face does something complicated at the mention of Madara's young cousin. She sniffles hard and then another wave of sobs overtake her. She doesn't bother hiding her face; her shame and her anger are bare on her ruddy cheeks. 

"I thought - I did  _everything_ right," she says, baring her soul to a perfect stranger. "I'm clanless, and I have to work five times as hard as anyone else to get even a little bit of what they have. I train harder than anyone else on my cell, and he just  _ignores_ me. So does Kakashi-sensei. Naruto is the only one that looks at me like I'm a person and that's because he's got a crush on me. And Sasuke-kun -," She hiccups but presses on, rubbing furiously at her face. "Sasuke-kun barely even knows my _name_."

She was climbing trees and walking on water before she even hit thirteen. That was the kind of work that Danzō himself had put in. And clanless at that. A clanless orphan.

If Tsunade saw enough in her to run her ragged like this, if Kakashi thought she was talented enough to be ignored while he worked with his other two students, then this child had potential beyond measure. To be ignored in favor of an Uchiha was something that Danzō was intimately familiar with. To be better than one but ignored anyway, in times like these, meant you were being trusted to handle your own training best that you could. To nail the basics so deeply into yourself that by the time your teacher looked at you again, it was time to set you on something more complicated. 

But this child didn't understand those politics as intimately as Danzō did, didn't have age and experience on her side to explain them to her. All she saw was neglect. Of course she was weeping. Clanless orphans had it harder than anyone else in this post-war-pre-war society. To her, being ignored probably meant the same as being left behind. 

"What is your name, then?" he asks. 

The girl looks at him, her puffy green eyes suddenly suspicious. Danzō can see why Sakumo's son leaves this girl to her own devices; she's sharper than her age and lack of wartime experience says she ought to be. 

"What's yours?" she asks. 

Danzō muffles a smirk before he replies, with a polite nod of his head, "Shimura Danzō."

Color drains from the girl's face and she stammers out an apology. He's a war hero, well decorated, though he's hardly seen overmuch in the village. He spends a great deal of time training on his own or with Homura in the archives, studying, learning. When he isn't there, he's training with Hiruzen or he's tangled in bed with Kagami, or deciphering the messages Koharu sends back in a code that only her closest allies in the village know. 

"Shimura-san," she says, breathless, "I'm so - ,"

"Your name and rank."

She swallows and her spine goes ramrod straight. 

"Haruno Sakura," then, after a beat, "genin."

A surname. So her parents had been reasonably well established before their passing. Or at least, she had been old enough to remember their family name before they died.

"Haruno Sakura," he says, testing the name. "Do you want to learn how to only use a thimble full of chakra to climb the Hokage Monument?"

Her jaw drops, and for a moment, Danzō is surprised with himself. This isn't like him at all. He isn't one to offer aid unless directly asked, or unless he's in a dire situation. A sobbing genin on the training grounds is neither of those. 

But Sakura reminds him of Goro. Reminds him of his sister, of Keiko before she died. Of himself. They were all that desperate, once. All that hungry. All that eager to prove themselves. To be better. To do better. To surpass the limitations placed on them by blood and coincidence. 

A smile breaks across her face, and she sheaths her kunai. She bows to him, formal as anything, and sucks back the snot that's been dripping down her nose so that her voice is clear when she says, "Yes! Please teach me!"

Haruno Sakura only has two teachers, but a third probably couldn't hurt. Besides, he'll only teach her how to more finely control her chakra, and then he'll wipe his hands of her. He doesn't want an apprentice. 

Somehow, he gets one anyway.


End file.
